Legal Commentary

I've been lurking with some interest behind Rick's post on obscure language and the extensive comments.  I have the power of the TypePad pen, so I'll offer up some thoughts, and try really hard not to be either obscure or boring.

I was thinking about one of the most popular unread books in recent history, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time.  I know he was trying to explain quantum mechanics and string theory and the like to ordinary people, but I still got no more than the briefest glimpse even into what he was saying there.  Do you really understand the idea of "spin" in atomic sub-particles?  My scientist son just told me he understands it but can't explain it to me in ordinary language - he says it's a quantum property and "spin" is as close as you are going to get.  Knowing that it has something to do with angular momentum of the electron isn't helping me either.  On the other hand, I suspect neither most people nor I ever have to confront this in their daily lives, any more than they have to confront whether there is an objective reality, much less how Kant managed to derive it in the transcendental deduction.

But people do think about right and wrong.  And bear with me for a moment with a golf analogy.  There are thousands of words written on how to hit a golf ball.  Maybe even more words than have been written about right and wrong.  The funny thing is that the ONLY thing that really matters in a golf swing is having the club face square (i.e. perpendicular to the intended line of flight) when it strikes the ball.  How hard you hit it may affect how far it goes, but hitting it square means it will go straight, and without hook or slice spin.  All of the thousands of words, all the different techniques, in golf swing instruction circle back to finding a way to have the student, no matter how awful the swing, hit it square.

That and Wittgenstein's dictum "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" are what struck me when I read commenter Matthew Cole's statement:  "What you'll find uniting basically all of the loose paradigm of "postmodernists" in political philosophy is that they argue that the normative claims about politics circulated by modernists are somehow contingent on a claim to absolute knowledge, when really all we have is contingent knowledge."  More on (moron?) this after the jump.

The dictum comes from the end of the Tractatus, early Wittgenstein, and is a statement of positivism.  Worrying about whether we have contingent or absolute knowledge is pointless, because there is no language in which to express what, for example, what a Kabbalahist means when she refers to God as "Ein Sof" (there is no end, something that actually means something to me, but it's shorthand for something else about which I cannot speak but which nevertheless seems true).  The famous "poker" exchange came much later, and it was provoked by a disagreement between Wittgenstein and Popper whether one could state any absolute moral imperatives.  (Popper response was yes, don't threaten visiting speakers with fireplace pokers.)

Despite Wittgenstein, we are not silent about what cannot be spoken.  Indeed, we are not silent about whether there are things about which we cannot speak.  No doubt Wittgenstein's frustration was the endless repetition of the same unresolvable issue.  Like a philosophical golf swing, the issue keeps coming back around to one thing:  can we know things, and particular what we ought to do, absolutely or not?  Everything else springs from that.  If absolutely, then how do we deal with reasonable disagreement?  If not, how can there be any standard at all?  (As in golf, the Wittgenstein answer is practice, practice, practice.)

Now unlike confronting sub-atomic particles, or even the objective reality of the physical universe, people, and not just philosophers, make moral choices every day, and even think about the process of making moral choices.  Most people either just swing the moral golf club and hope that the face will be square, or adopt one or two fundamentals (philosophical golf pros call those "swing heuristics").  Few people deal with, or want to deal with, the theory of the golf swing.  It's only fairly recently that religion dropped out of the intellectual tool box, and no golf pro worth his or her salt merely says "have faith in your swing."  Among the pros, there's a lexicon.  The lexicon is only a problem if you think knowing the lexicon has something to do with either with keeping the club face square in golf, or knowing the right thing to do in life. 

So I'm perfectly willing to concede superior knowledge to any physicist when it comes to understanding muons and quarks.  But I'm not willing to concede to Kant, Hume, Aristotle, Heidegger, Lacan, Derrida, Leiter, Buber, Rick Hills, Brian Leiter, or Dan Markel (well, maybe Dan) any greater insight than me into absolute or contingent knowledge or right and wrong.  Only the lexicon.